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<H1 CLASS="title">Printer Accounting Basics</H1>

<P>CUPS supports a variety of printer accounting schemes. Aside from the
built-in <A HREF="#QUOTAS">quota</A> and <A HREF="#PAGELOG">page logging</A>
support, there are several third-party solutions that can be found online.</P>


<H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="QUOTAS">Quota Support</A></H2>

<P>CUPS supports page and size-based quotas for each printer.
The quotas are tracked individually for each user, but a single set of
limits applies to all users for a particular printer. For example, you
can limit every user to 5 pages per day on an expensive printer, but
you cannot limit every user except Johnny.</P>

<P>The <CODE>job-k-limit</CODE>, <CODE>job-page-limit</CODE>, and <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE>
options determine whether and how quotas are enforced for a printer.
The <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE> option determines the time interval for
quota tracking. The interval is expressed in seconds, so a day is
86,400, a week is 604,800, and a month is 2,592,000 seconds. The
<CODE>job-k-limit</CODE> option specifies the job size limit in kilobytes. The
<CODE>job-page-limit</CODE> option specifies the number of pages limit.</P>

<P>For quotas to be enforced, the period and at least one of the limits
must be set to a non-zero value. The following options will enable
weekly quotas with the given size and page count limits:</P>

<PRE CLASS="command">
<KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \
    -o job-k-limit=1024 ENTER</KBD>
<KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \
    -o job-page-limit=100 ENTER</KBD>
</PRE>

<P>Or, you can combine all three options on the same line.</P>

<P>While there is no way to query the current quota state for a particular
user, any application can request a list of jobs for a user and printer that
can be used to easily determine that information.</P>


<H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="PAGELOG">Page Logging</A></H2>

<P>CUPS can log every page that is printed on a system to the <VAR><A HREF="man-cupsd-logs.html">page_log</A></VAR> file. Page logging must be enabled by setting the <CODE>PageLogFormat</CODE> directive in the <VAR><A HREF="man-cupsd.conf.html">cupsd.conf</A></VAR> file and is only available for drivers that provide page accounting information, typically all PostScript and CUPS raster devices. Raw queues and queues using third-party solutions such as Foomatic generally do not have useful page accounting information available.</P>

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